


Stranded All In Love On My Own

by catteo



Category: The Vampire Diaries (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-10
Updated: 2014-07-10
Packaged: 2018-02-08 08:17:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 590
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1933635
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/catteo/pseuds/catteo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>this floor is crackling cold, she took my heart, I think she took my soul...</p>
            </blockquote>





	Stranded All In Love On My Own

He loves her.

 _She doesn’t even care._

 

++++

 

Damon’s not a fool. He has been many things in this life; brother, son, soldier, lover. The one that was never good enough for those that he loved. For a time he allows himself to forget these certainties that make him who he is. The golden warmth of the soft summer chases away the darkness of his truths. She makes him believe in love. He remembers now, as pain blooms in his chest, that he is always the one that loses. 

 

++++

 

She arrives with the first breath of summer and somehow outshines their sun. Her demurely downcast eyes don’t quite manage to hide the fire that flashes beneath. She smiles and he feels his world shift infinitesimally from sense to chaos. He stands shoulder to shoulder with his brother and wonders at the way his heart begins to race. He throws down his challenge with a smile and gives chase, certain that this time he can win. 

She whispers promises of forever in the dusk and comes to him in darkness. She steals his breath with a kiss and burns his soul with a feather-light touch. He feels her hand, cool on his chest, fingertips brushing somehow against his heart. She shows him her true face in the ink black midnight, punctures soft skin with a murmur of love. She never asks for his heart, but he gives it anyway, never realising how easily its brittle shell can be broken.

 

++++

 

He whispers her name with a dying breath. Feels it like a prayer, dark and rich, slipping across his tongue. As he wakes in the shadows he reaches out for her, only to feel the cold emptiness of the night. He finds instead that she has given him a brother who is at once the same and irrevocably changed. He tries to fight, but he knows that he was always the weak one and surrenders finally to his hunger. 

 

++++

 

When, at last, he discovers the truth he gives himself over to the hate in the broken shards of his heart that still remain. He rages against the choices he has made and curses himself for not being stronger, more courageous. He has spent lifetimes searching, trying to save her, only to find the empty spaces she has left inside him. All that remains is a hollow shell of the man he used to be.

 

++++

 

She comes back to him at last, blazing across the life he has carefully built, threatening to bring it all crashing down with a brutal smile. The hope that stirs in his chest is so foreign to him now that it almost passes by unnoticed. He recognises it only as it flames in his chest, with the heat of her pressing hard up against him. In the space of a heartbeat she steals it all away. Leaves him with nothing but ashes and regrets.

 

++++

 

He embraces the darkness, relishes the salt burn in his throat and drinks his fill. Somehow he finds himself standing once again in the warmth of the sunlight and finds that, after all, he is worth saving. Slowly he lets himself remember who he is; brother, soldier, friend. The one who doesn’t always have to lose. He knows now that a part of him goes with her. They’re ice and fire and they consume each other. He fears who he is when he’s with her. She stands in his doorway offering him another life and her only truth.

 

He doesn’t even care.

_She loves him._


End file.
